


Things Men Do

by th_esaurus



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, M/M, Mild Black Panther spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-15
Updated: 2018-02-18
Packaged: 2019-03-19 03:27:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13695894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/th_esaurus/pseuds/th_esaurus
Summary: “Tell me about Steve Rogers,” she said, sounding sly.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> thanks, as ever, to liz <3

She had sequestered him out to the flanks of the Borderlands as soon as trouble rumbled on Wakanda’s plains. “I can help,” he’d told her at once. “I know war.”

“This is not war,” she laughed, tight, kissing his forehead fondly. “This is family.”

And Bucky had not known about that for a good many years, so he did not argue again.

-

He lay on the sheepskin rug, staring up at the reedy, sloping roof of the tent, listening to the distant storm of the fight: the kind of howling yell that travels far on the wind, clashing spears, the wail and roar of great beasts that he’d glimpsed, briefly, domestic and chewing the cud as Shuri flew him out of the city. There were familiar noises every so often. The high-pitched whine of a laser firing. The stark, distant boom as a ship crashed to the muddy ground, shoring up the earth, deep enough to dig up bones.

His mind supplied the sound of gunfire, a false echo. Old-fashioned and desperate. He could still hear the ring of his sniper after each single shot.

Everything was quiet again by dusk.

His squabbles with Steve, all the way back when, had settled down at a similar pace. Morning anger dissipated into eye-rolls and truces by sundown. They’d argue over girls, money, politics, the war. “You always gotta play devil’s advocate,” Steve would mutter, and Bucky always laughed at him, how stubborn he was, and only made it worse.

“Don’t be sore with me,” Bucky would wheedle, always the first to give in.

“Then don’t rile me up so much,” Steve snapped back.

Family feuds had a short-burning kind of heat, Bucky supposed, from what he could remember.

He waited, and hoped he would see Shuri again soon. He liked her, and she seemed to like him, and both things were painfully rare.

Everything was quiet.

-

He had always expected to be woken by Steve’s grim stoicism and a dry mission brief; instead, the first thing he saw was Shuri’s bright face, both of her hands holding his as she helped him down, weak legs and shaking shoulders, from the cryo-chamber.

She took everything slowly. Introduced herself first, let him know that he was in Wakanda, and that he was safe. Told him, truncated, what she knew of him. “You’re not such a ghost these days,” she said slyly. SHIELD’s files, all splashed across the dark web, outed him with just enough detail to matter.

She had a bedroom kitted out for him, next to the lab, and told him not to touch anything in a voice that suggested he could do just the opposite; but Bucky had always been good at following orders.

He slept badly, feverish. The deep mattress belied a level of comfort he hadn’t known in years, and made him uneasy. The last time he slept on something this soft, he dimly recalled, was in Alexander Pierce’s lofty compound. Only ever a single night; the specifics well-scrubbed from his tired mind.

The next night, Shuri gave him a beaded bracelet that glowed a gentle blue. “Just talk into it if you need me,” she explained.

“A baby monitor?” he said, his eyebrows raised.

“Ah, he jokes!” she grinned, clapping her hands together joyfully.

He mustered a smile for her. He was out of practice. Two years in Romania had left him with a tight, close-mouthed smile, more an acknowledgement than an emotion: a nodded thanks to harried women in coffee shops and noisy marketplace men. He had moved often but with irregularity, renting a new apartment every few months, and locals never got to know him well enough for the genuine pleasure of a regular.

But her smile was radiant enough for the both of them.

It was two more days before she explained that while he slept, she had sent a series of electrostatic pulses through his nervous system, a kind of shock therapy - “Nothing like Western medicine,” she was quick to say, unhidden disdain in her voice - that, in layman’s terms, had rebooted his operating system.

“I un-brainwashed you,” she beamed.

He did not want to mock her enthusiasm. “I don’t think it’s as easy as that.”

“I didn’t say it was easy,” Shuri chided. “I said I did it.”

She got up to _Daybreak_ in his trigger sequence before he stopped her frantically. His remaining hand was shaking, badly, and he had wanted to reach out and grab her neck, stopper her breath, crush the words in her throat. “Stop,” he gasped, like he’d run for miles. He realised he was leaning forward in his chair, opposite her, crouched like a leopard, and he made himself unclench all over, tried to settle back.

“Trust me,” she asked him.

“I can’t,” he replied. She did not know him. He was a loaded gun.

“We don’t use guns here,” she said, smiling.

All the more reason to handle him with care; or better yet, not touch him at all.

“It’d be better for everyone if you just--” He rubbed his face, sighing. He was sweating thickly, and his hand was still trembling. “If you just put me back on ice. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the effort, but--”

Shuri held up a hand to halt him, with such self-belief in her action that he shut up, immediate. All at once he remembered he was not speaking to a girl, any girl, but to a princess.

She told him a story. “When I was small, all I wanted was to be the Black Panther. To protect my kingdom and my people. I wanted it so badly that I challenged my brother, a prince then, for our grandfather’s ring - for his place in the line of succession. We were both just people, just muscle, sticks and stones and human bones. I thought wanting it more than my brother meant I could win.”

Shuri laughed, a noise too old and bitter for her youth. “I lost very poorly.” She twisted around, lifting the hem of her shirt so that he could see a faded scar on the back of her hip. “T’Challa timed his blow badly. He had meant to nick me, to prove a point, and instead cut right through my puppy fat. He cried, afterwards, you know. Cuddled me and cried.”

“How old were you?” Bucky asked quietly.

“I was nine years old. And now,” she said, pointing across the lab to the mannequin nestled in the corner, its saber-toothed necklace bright under the cavernous light, “I am twice as old as that and have built my brother a suit to save the world with.”

She leant forward, and took his hand, dry skin between the webbing of his fingers and dank sweat on his palm. “We each have our own strengths. Sometimes we just have to learn what they are.”

He liked how confident she was.

Bucky already knew he was a weapon.

He just didn’t know whose anymore.

-

He spent four days rising with the sun, waiting to see if Shuri came back. Months on the move in Eastern Europe had taught him how to carve a routine for himself, so he set to it.

He took an afternoon to scope out the lay of the Borderlands. Shuri had housed him by a watering hole, maybe two miles from the nearest village, an easy walk for the local kids, who made a game of spying on him from the copse of fruit trees around the edge of the lake. He bared his teeth at them and growled to make them giggle, pretending to flee only to reappear minutes later, still breathless with laughter.

They must have heard the battle too, and were utterly unperturbed by it all.

He was still strong enough that he could climb the trees with his one hand and bare feet. Plucked bush pears from the lower branches and let them drop to the golden grass. He stored any that were unripe in his tent, and ate the rest, the fatty fruit dripping juice down his palm.

He washed in the lake. It was cold but he was used to it: hot water was expensive, back in Brooklyn, and he’d always let Steve take the first bath, putting up with the chilly dregs while Steve toweled himself dry in the corner of the bathroom. They hosed him down, in Russia, and continued to do so when he was loaned, forcibly, to Pierce’s Strike team. Put him in a tiled room and sprayed the blood off his hands and body. Nobody got close enough to scrub him. It often clumped under his fingernails, he remembered.

Here he could strip down and float, at his leisure, on the calm water. Let the sun dry him. Dress again, in his loose, afternoon-warm clothes.

The local children got bolder. They brought him bowls of cooked rice, dried strips of meat, and a kind of milk that wasn’t dairy but he couldn’t quite place. It tasted fresh and he swallowed it gratefully. In return, he let them poke at his pale cheeks, laugh at his scruffy beard, and play with his lank hair, tying it up into little rat-tails with pieces of braided string. One little boy got carried away, pulled his hair into four messy bunches, and he waved them all away, gently. “Okay, okay,” he said, and they shrieked with delight at his hoarse voice. “Just one’ll do.”

Bucky felt calm, and it unnerved him.

He liked that the floor of the tent was hard under his back. It helped him sleep at night. He dreamed of memories more than he dreamed of waking nightmares.

He dreamed of Steve; and rose with the sun.

-

Shuri came back to him with a steely gaze and a proud grin, and reminded him, for a moment, of young soldiers who crowed they’d won the war at the end of every skirmish. Raising toasts in their damp tents, with flat beer in mud-flecked bottles.

Those men were all dead now, and Steve, the only one left alive, had never had any use for beer.

-

She came back to him in a buzzing light aircraft, and three armoured women helped her take a hovering steel crate out of the cargo bay. He had cleaned up, when he heard their approach, gathering up all the sucked-clean pits of his stone fruit. He assumed she’d take him back to her lab, now that blood had been spilled and scores settled.

“It’s nicer out here, don’t you think?” she said, taking her unfamiliar tools out of the crate.

She brought the lab to him.

“Do you want an arm,” Shuri asked, “or a weapon?”

“The latter,” he said, without pause.

She eyed him side-on, a little curious and a little annoyed. “Do you want an arm,” she asked again, “or do you want a weapon?”

Bucky thought about it.

“Both,” he decided.

-

They talked easily. She never expected conversation from him, and was happy enough with his silent nods and one-word answers. She liked the sound of her own voice in a way that was endearing. She only talked of things that interested her, she claimed, but she was a curious girl, fascinated by everything; she could definitely ramble.

Shuri measured and tested him with instruments he could not begin to understand, like they had in Germany, in Russia, but she explained everything she was doing, each step of the way. She tutted about the crude titanium fastening, fixed, forever, in the nub of his arm, and lamented she could not pull the whole thing out and start over with vibranium.

He was uneasy, to be conscious through all this. He only had fluttering, grey memories, waking bleary, half anesthetized, to find his severed arm reattached anew, heavy and brutal. He wished he could sleep, and let her work.

Shuri sensed his unease, perhaps, and put her equipment aside, and carried on with her hands. Whether it was of any use to her or she just wanted to soothe him, he couldn’t find it in himself to argue.

He liked the way she touched him, from the very start. Without fear.

They talked, and he found it too easy to dredge dark thoughts from the dank pool of his mind.

“You thought I murdered your father,” he said, quiet.

“Yes,” she replied breezily, testing the tension around his shoulder with the small pad of her thumb. “And I would have been happy for my brother to kill you. But he didn’t, because you didn’t.”

“I would have.” It was a little difficult to say, even if it was true. “One time.”

He couldn’t remember killing Howard Stark; but he remembered the sound of his wife screaming, scratchy audio from an old video tape.

She pushed both thumbs up into his armpit, and he flinched, sensitive there from an old, awkward stab-wound. “My brother worries about _what-ifs_ too. Either you did something or you didn’t.”

He did remember the desperate face of the woman who had thrust her flick knife into the fatty cavity under his arm. The blood in her brunette hair, her wide, shaking eyes. They protruded almost cartoonishly as he throttled her. The strength in his weaponised fingers cracked the bones in her neck, sheared her spine. She had seemed startled about dying.

“I did a lot of things,” he murmured.

“You are not the only person who has ever killed,” Shuri said, too bold.

Bucky could not bring himself to say, _yes, but--_

-

He liked her pride: in her country, her parents, her brother. He used to talk of Steve, in his absence, with that same pride, and was always met with incredulity. Nobody could believe how fiercely that little firecracker burned.

“Tell me about Steve Rogers,” she said, sounding sly, and he huffed out a dry laugh.

“Sounds like you already know.”

He liked when she was in a flighty mood, all her expressions and gestures exaggerated. She shrugged, and her shoulders brushed the bottom of her earlobes. “People have mocked my brother for dressing like a cat, but at least he does not drape himself in a flag.”

Bucky’s laugh was real this time. “Yeah, Steve never cared much for it either.”

“So tell me,” she said again, nudging Bucky’s shoulder playfully.

He hadn’t had the chance to bolster Steve in so long. “He’s a good man,” Bucky murmured. “He was never meant to be a perfect soldier.”

He told her about how Steve’s feet were so skinny he used to stuff newspaper down one side of his shoes to keep them from slipping off. He told her about how he’d push a handkerchief to Steve’s bloody nose after he picked on someone twice his size, washing the cloth in their little sink afterwards; how it’d clogged, more than once, and left a pinky swirl of standing water for days and days, smelling of rot. He told her about getting Steve drunk one New Year’s Eve, his small body even more lightweight than Bucky’d imagined, a quarter bottle of cheap hard cider and he’d spent the count of midnight with his hand rubbing Steve’s skinny back, over the notches of his spine, as he threw up vehemently into the toilet bowl.

Bucky pulled up short, embarrassed. “This isn’t--what you wanted to hear, I’m guessing.”

Shuri had been tooling around with a screwdriver as he spoke, his arm taking shape between her proficient hands, both of them sitting cross-legged under the tent’s canopy. She had an aimless sort of smile on her lips, unselfconscious and pleased.

“I like the way you talk about him,” she said. She shot him a look he couldn’t quite decipher. “Do you miss him?”

“All the time,” Bucky said, without thinking. He scratched his bristly chin, something to distract her from his painful honesty.

“My brother says we miss the ones we love most of all when they are within arm’s reach. But he only says that because he has to go on diplomatic missions with his ex.”

“Steve’s not--”

“Your ex?” She was grinning, clearly goading him.

“Aren’t you s’posed to be working?” he snapped, playful with her in a way he thought he’d forgotten.

“Tou-chy,” she said, sing-song, and smiled like she knew something he didn’t.

Shuri knew plenty he didn’t. Bucky had surely learnt that by now.

-

The next morning, her little aircraft was back, bearing new cargo.

“Buck,” Steve said, like it was the only word he knew.


	2. Chapter 2

There was a weight to Steve that Bucky felt immediately. Not just his bulk, always a surprise after stretches apart, but something in his expression. He was heavy with their shared history, old friendship, and something unrecognisable: deep and sour and inconsolable.

He and Bucky had always been, on the surface, so different growing up. Stocky, handsome, a charmer; gangly and pale and constantly overcompensating for it. After the serum, that gap between them got abruptly shorter, a tense snap of elastic suddenly short and slack. Now Steve had taken it a step further, consciously or not.

“Nice beard,” Bucky said, a smile tugging his lips.

Steve’s huffing laugh was so familiar that it felt like a rough slap against Bucky’s back, knocking him off balance. “Incognito, right?”

As if no-one would fail to recognise the brightness of his eyes.

Shuri hovered nearby, eavesdropping openly but not interrupting. She was fiddling with the beads on her wrist, perhaps recording them, in case this conversation goes awry. He didn’t mind. He could feel her eyes on them and, maybe, her lack of love for Steve. An interruption. An anomaly thrown into the equation. She’d been doing good work, out here, with Bucky, and they both knew this would be a--

Distraction.

“How’re you holding up, Buck?”

“Doing good,” he said shortly, with a nod towards Shuri: _she’s doing me good._

Steve nodded too, a quiet echo. He was being too tentative, always was when he fell back in with Bucky these days.

He looked out of place here in the dusky plains. Jeans and plaid, his slicked hair and neat beard. Bucky couldn’t remember, at first, the last time he’d seen white skin that wasn’t his own (later, he’d realise, that was Steve too. His strained smile faltering at the last minute before the cryo-chamber swallowed Bucky whole). He had always stood out for the wrong reasons in Brooklyn, too, a beige smudge in that vibrant city; too dull for the fat neon lights on Coney, too ungainly for the chattering dance halls, too feeble to pull himself up the fire escapes and watch the hazy stars. Hand-me-down jackets and bad haircuts.

Bucky had cut Steve’s hair back then. Never quite got the knack for it.

His hands were better trained, now.

“Have you come all this way for small talk?” Shuri said, finally, sounding far more petulant than Bucky knew her to be. She was playing up for unfamiliar company. “Or did you have a point?”

“Hey, hey,” Bucky chided, “He was here first.”

In his life, by his side. A part of his soul before Shuri started tinkering.

“She’s right,” Steve said, not noticing any significance or swallowing it, hard, before it bubbled to the surface and waylaid him again. “Buck, I brought you here because it was safe. T’Challa--”

“ _King_ T’Challa.”

“--the King offered you sanctuary he can’t guarantee anymore. Wakanda’s out in the world now. There are a lot of eyes looking this way.”

“Nowhere left to run,” Bucky nodded, easily pragmatic.  

“We’re both fugitives now.” Steve smiled unhappily. There were ghosts in his smile.

Back in the war, Bucky had let himself grieve for his friend, just a little. Not fallen, not dead, thank God. But he remembered, blearily, babbling: _is it permanent?_ \--because in his dozy, pain-blurred state, that had been the only important thing. When was Steve coming back? When would _his_ Steve come back?

Not fallen, no, but changed irreparably.

They were all changed by that war, he supposed; and he hoped, in that dull way he always thought about things he could not affect, that Shuri had been let off lightly by hers.

-

They rode to the city, at the invitation of the King.

The Border tribe bred horses like they raised their children: strong and proud and curious. Shuri had set him learning to ride with a local herder, though she was plenty proficient herself, but Steve was out of his element, clinging to the mare’s wide flank, not knowing whether to grab her muscular neck or find some kind of grip in her mane. He probably could have run beside them and kept pace, but didn’t want to seem rude.

“All-American boy and he doesn’t know how to ride?” Shuri crowed, delighted.

“I’m from Brooklyn!” was all Steve could manage in retort, and it made Bucky laugh, full-throated, his head back in the rushing wind. Steve barely knew how to ride a bicycle; the New York streets had always been too crowded, too narrow.

When he met Steve’s gaze again, it was watery and wide open with happiness. All from a little laugh.

-

Shuri had grown up in the city, the council and palaces nestled in its heart, and it was Steve’s diplomatic passage into the country, but Bucky’s only view of Wakanda was Shuri’s lab and the quiet outskirts of the Borderlands; the capitol was a lot to take in.

He had few good memories of silvery metropolises and found himself glancing up, seeking flat rooftops, escape routes, and closer to earth, shadowy alleyways or thickets of people to help him merge in with the crowd. There were missions that required brute force, leather armour and a grille over his nose and mouth like a dog; and there were missions where he loped awkwardly amongst the populus, feigning civility, a blank-eyed citizen.

Nobody remembered his face because nobody was left alive to remember.

Shuri touched the back of his hand gently, so as not to startle him. “Hey,” she said, quiet. “You want me to call a car? We don’t have to walk.”

Steve, hesitant, was hanging back, nothing to do but allow Shuri her strange intimacy.

Bucky shook his head. “It’s all yours,” he said instead. “So introduce me.”

Grinning, she grabbed his hand fully. Showed him everything. Pointed out the distant school where she learnt the tools of her trade, an academy that would make MIT blush; dragged him into the marketplace to meet her favourite vendor, an old man selling grains and spices who had a paper bag of tiger nuts stashed away for her; chastised a group of teenagers playing some high-tech variant of craps in the street, throwing holographic dice and trading money noisily on their beaded bracelets. “Mercy, Princess,” they said, cheeky, and she feigned turning a blind eye.

“Her people love her,” Steve murmured. He’d caught up, close to Bucky’s side as Shuri darted ahead.

“D’you miss that?” Bucky asked, careful.

Steve scoffed, a little bitter. “People never loved me. They loved America. I don’t think I’m that anymore.”

Bucky, nationless for a long time now, had forgotten what patriotism felt like.

He knew he loved Steve, though. That, he knew.

-

T’Challa hosted them courteously, likely nagged into it by his tenacious sister. He had better ways to spend his time, especially with the petty tension that hung over them. T’Challa looked at Bucky with a well-hidden kind of pity, and Bucky never minded it. He spent so long being a source of fear, of contempt, being the last thing people saw as they died; pity did him just fine.

Bucky could easily discern both conversations, quite clearly. A side effect of Zola’s giddy experimentation that hadn’t faded over the decades. T’Challa and Steve on his left, talking diplomacy. Steve had always hated the politics expected of his service, of his name; there was something childishly petulant about the way he just wanted to fight the bad guys, even as _bad_ morphed into a relative term. Bucky caught his name _\- Sergeant Barnes -_ enter the fray, and he knew Steve was asking permission to take him back. Take him home.

Wherever that was.

Shuri, on his right, was chattering animatedly about his arm. “It’s almost done,” she was saying. “Really, technically it’s finished, but in my opinion nothing is ever truly finished, and I wanted to see if I could improve the weight distribution - I’ll need you to try it on, maybe later, after dinner, we can go to the lab--”

“Are you--” Steve interrupted, halting the low conversation. “Excuse me. Are you--building him an arm?”

Shuri grinned, delighted.

Steve did not echo her. “A weapon?”

She shrugged, dismissive. “It’s not a gun, if that’s what you mean. Nothing like Klaue’s abomination.”

“But a weapon, right?”

“Your hand is a weapon if you want it to be,” Shuri said darkly, and T’Challa shot her a warning look.

Steve was shaking his head, almost imperceptible. “I don’t--I mean no offence, but I don’t know if that’s the right thing to do here. Buck needs to present the least threat possible when I take him out of Wakanda--”

“Out of Wakanda?” Shuri laughed, shocked. “He is not ready.”

“Why do you think I came here, highness?” Steve spoke steadily, neither rude nor gracious.

He seemed so sad. He had the whole time he’d been here.

 _“Enough,_ _”_ T’Challa said, sounding so suddenly like a king. An ancient line, an abject assuredness. “Enough talk. We came here to eat. Please--” he gestured to the spread, all politeness once more. “Eat.”

Shuri ate, fast, and left the table long before the rest of them had even finished.

-

“There are rooms for you, if you’ll have them,” T’Challa offered; kinder than he needed to be.

“The open air does me good,” Bucky admitted.

“As you please,” said the King, and that was the end of that.

-

He caught her alone, before they left, on one of a hundred thousand balconies in the city. The sparkling urban sprawl made her look small, her legs curled up to her chest, her thin arms wrapped around her knees; he had never noticed it out on the plains. So vast they made everyone equally insignificant.

Bucky sat with her a while, and she reached out to touch some part of him, whatever was nearest, for comfort. “I thought having Steve Rogers here might help you. A familiar face.” She sighed, sounding too old. “I did not think he’d have his own agenda.”

“Guys’ll always play you like that,” Bucky said, something of old New York in his voice. It made her smile.

“Even you?”

“Oh sure. A real cad, me.”

“And what’s your agenda?” she asked, with that sly, needling tone.

He had no clue. Fumbled for a joke to answer her and found nothing. He could pay a sideshow fortune-teller a thousand dollars to read his palm, and she’d still come up blank.

He sensed Shuri retreat, aware that she might’ve pushed too far. It wasn’t her fault. The silence they slipped into was comfortable enough, and he appreciated that.

He liked that she allowed him to be quiet, sometimes.

“You--” she began, after a long while. “You’ve loved him for a very long time.”

Neither question nor statement, but at least Bucky could answer with the truth this time.

“It makes things complicated.”

She nodded, and asked nothing more.

-

It was just approaching dusk when the two of them landed at Bucky’s little home-from-home, his humble flat-floored tent with the whole of the Borderlands sloping out front. “You mind me tagging along?” Steve had asked. Bucky loathed this pussy-footing around each other, but didn’t know how to break it; so shrugged, agreed. There was room enough in his tent for the both of them and this chasm between them.

They’d spent years living in each other’s pockets, never asking a thing, just knowing, assuming, accepting. He wondered if that was why Shuri felt so easy to be around. She was not tentative with him.

“You wanna go for a swim?” Bucky said, glancing at the pristine lake. It looked like glass under the setting sun, wide and glossy, purple and gold.

Steve smiled, and it felt almost genuine. “I’ll race you.”

“Oh, you’re on, Rogers.”

They stripped down fast, over-eager, Steve hopping on the grass with one foot stuck in his jeans. Bucky’s kaftan was far easier to pull off, and he jumped into the water first, naked, some heady thrill in cracking that still surface and letting the ripples his body made pool across the water, as if each one proved: _I’m here, I’m here._

Steve called to him from the shoreline. “You remember that night on Coney Island? You made us go skinny-dipping and I damn near caught pneumonia from it?”

He was naked too, now, and Bucky looked awhile. Then turned away, rolled his eyes and his body to the sky, floating on the lukewarm water.

“I was such a brat to you after,” Bucky says, listening to Steve’s feet and knees and thighs splash into the lake. Steve had not been seriously ill - Bucky was keenly attuned to it, back then - just complained all night about the cold and how shrivelled up he felt; so back at their apartment, Bucky had wrapped him up in every blanket they owned, two tatty suit jackets on top just to make a point, boiled him hot water with lemon and sat on the bed, his legs wrapped around Steve’s dumpy lump, and rubbed his hands all through the ratty cotton sheets, asking insufferably, “Better now? Warm now?”

“You jackass,” Steve said fondly.

They made a starting line between two leaning trees, and swam all the way from one end of the lake to the other and back again; Bucky compensating for his one arm by kicking up a storm with his legs. Despite the heavy splash of the water and the effort of pulling his thick body along with one cupped hand, Bucky felt calmed by the exercise. He kept catching flashes of Steve’s white skin beside him as they overtook each other time and time again. That was how Steve had been for him, for such a long time. Near a century. Just glimpses of some unfathomable shape, that felt, all the while, like Bucky could learn how to recognise them if he just tried hard enough.

Steve won, of course, but by less that they’d both thought.

“You’d have whipped me, back in the day,” Steve said, barely panting.

“Even with the handicap,” Bucky agreed.

It was almost dark, now. Bucky’s vivid eyesight always made it hard to notice when day turned to night, but it was easier out here, where the light was full of colour and the darkness absolute.

“I didn’t--” Steve started. Took a breath, collected himself. “I didn’t come out here to fetch you as a tool, Buck. As a soldier. Just as a friend.”

“Aren’t we both?”

Steve scoffed mildly, a sad sound. “When d’you start getting wise?”

“She’s teaching me.”

Silence again. The lap of gentle water against their skin. Foreign birds Bucky was only just starting to recognise; mountain cats calling back and forth slowly across the plains, across the whole country. An old rumble of conversation that might have been going on for centuries, long before Steve and Bucky ever existed, that would not be finished in their lifetimes.

“Come on,” Bucky said, finding his feet in the shallows of the lake. “You’ll catch your damn pneumonia again.”

-

“You know,” he whispered, “the arm Shuri’s making me--it’s vibranium. Same as your shield.”

They were lying back to back, in the almost total darkness of the tent; midnight. Neither of them asleep. Steve said nothing, but Bucky heard him breathe in, sharply. A little too sharp.

After the same pause, they both rolled over. Quite close. Sharing the same thin blanket, though neither of them needed it much. Bucky could see Steve through the blackish night, not clearly, but the curves and angles of his face, catching the minute starlight that tried to push its way through the hessian walls. All those shuttered emotions on his face, like street-lights behind a closed blind; never quite entirely hidden.

Bucky had always been able to read him. He just hadn’t always been able to answer Steve’s unasked questions.

“Bucky,” Steve murmured, and seemed startled at himself.

“Steve,” Bucky agreed.

It wasn’t--

It wasn’t the first time they’d kissed like this. Slow and open-mouthed, thick tongues, heavy handed. Steve slid his arm under Bucky’s neck and crooked it up, almost cradling him in the nook of his elbow. They breathed each other’s breath, tasted each other’s taste, and it was all both so familiar and a craving entirely unsated.

Bucky couldn’t help but find Steve’s body so damn strange every time, after so many years of touching him skinny, and then so many more of touching nobody at all. He put his hand on Steve’s bicep, and found the muscle there too bizarre, and went instead for the safety of his ribs. To be able to feel them, under his skin; that was something he remembered.

Steve was the better kisser of them now. Bucky was out of practice. It didn’t matter. It wasn't a competition.

They could’ve carried on with it. They could. They had done before, got carried away with it, and Bucky knew distinctly what Steve sounded like, when he came. But he didn’t feel like chasing it tonight. Not with both of them so fragile.

“We’re gonna have to talk about this one day,” he muttered, when they finally pulled apart.

“I know,” Steve sighed, and gathered him up close, and kissed him again.

-

He dreamed of Steve, and rose, alone, with the sun.

-

The local children were playing outside, a game where they ran up to the flap of his tent and stuck through a fist, a waving hand, and entire arm, all trying to goad him into sitting by the door and snatching at them. Fearless. They paid no mind to their princess, and to the white man she spoke with.

Bucky could see them by the lake, every time the flap clipped open.

He could hear them far more clearly. He didn’t mean to pry. He was just trained to be attentive.

“I just want Bucky to have a say in all this,” Steve told her, tight and serious. “That was taken away from him for so long. I want him to know that he doesn’t have to be a weapon anymore.”

“We discussed these things, of course we did. I know you think I’m a child, but I’m not an imbecile.”

“Your highness--”

“Just Shuri, out here, please.” He heard her sigh, frustrated, and when the tent door flipped open again, giggles outside, he could see Steve had moved closer to her, his arms unfolded, open and honest.

“Bucky looked after me for so long,” he said, quiet. “I want to repay him.”

“It’s not a one-way street. We have to watch each other’s backs. I asked him what he wanted, and this is what he chose. You weren’t here,” she said, sharp again.

Steve didn’t argue that.

She forced herself to soften. “Allow him the dignity of his choice.”

Steve laughed at that, sudden disbelief, and Bucky could see Shuri bristle, but Steve’s hands went up, defensive, to calm her. “No, I’m sorry, it’s just--you’re not the first person to say that to me. Old habits, I guess.”

Bucky wondered absently who’d ever said that to Steve in the past. Wondered if he had been dead, when it happened.

“He’d doing well here,” Shuri said, her final argument. “Don’t take that away from him. Not yet.”

And then one of the boys ran fully into the tent, pushed by the others, and Bucky grabbed his waist playfully, rough-housed him to the ground while he shrieked with laughter and yelled the name they had given him - _White Wolf,_ Shuri translated, with deadpan amusement - pulling at Bucky’s hair and flailing little fists on his chest until Bucky feigned uncle, lay on the ground defeated, and let the boy plant a foot on his chest and crow out his victory.

The ruckus brought Steve back into the tent, and the boys all fled. Shuri was nowhere to be seen, and Bucky was sorry to have missed her. Sorry that it seemed he could only have one or the other of them. Never both together, cordial and happy.

They sat side by side. Knees almost touching. The slightest gap between them a chasm again.

“I’m guessing you heard all that, huh?” Steve said, sheepish.

Bucky didn’t bother to nod.

“She’s desperately keen on you,” he carried on, and he meant no offence by it. She was openly fond of Bucky, and never hid it. A crush, some might have called it, on a different continent, in a different context.

“I think she saved my life,” Bucky said, quite serious.

Steve accepted that. Let the moment linger and fade.

“She told me your arm’s ready. She wants us to test it out. Your arm, my shield.”

“What a double-act.”

Steve laughed, warm and low, but he cut it short with a sigh. “I can’t hang around here, Buck. There’s only so much diplomatic immunity T’Challa can offer a wanted fugitive.”

“A pair of them.”

“Right.” Steve turned his head and waited for Bucky to do the same. It wasn’t hard to meet his gaze, but it was hard to hold it. Far too heavy.

“Come with me, Buck,” Steve murmured, and pushed forward and kissed Bucky softly, in a way he never really had before: close-mouthed, chaste, pleading. He seemed ashamed of it, like the kiss was somehow blackmail. But Bucky appreciated it, and put his hand on the back of Steve’s neck, and took another, and another.

“Come with me,” was all Steve could whisper.

And for a long, long time, Bucky thought about his answer.


End file.
